


hidden gems

by bluexshift



Series: battle-frenzied [2]
Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Dark Magnus Bane, M/M, it's a magnus that fits totally with his past and how he was raised, this is quite violent, well kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-08
Updated: 2019-04-08
Packaged: 2020-01-06 18:02:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18393545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluexshift/pseuds/bluexshift
Summary: magnus is kind, and generous, and loving. but he is also named great destruction; he is asmodeus' son, raised to rule edom, and sometimes for all that he works to overcome it, it surfaces.or the one in which they find the warlock responsible for attempted mass murder.





	hidden gems

**Author's Note:**

> magnus is the best because he has the potential to be extraordinarily kind and also to be absolutely horrifying. what's important is that he chooses to be kind, mostly.
> 
> find me on twitter [@aglightwoodbane](http://twitter.com/aglightwoodbane)!

The Clave had, unsurprisingly, been incredibly unhelpful in something they deemed as a “solely warlock” problem. Alec being there at the time was apparently his own fault. He thinks that the representative he’d spoken to was still disgusted by Alec’s decision to “taint” the Lightwood name by joining it with a Downworlders’, with Magnus Bane’s, rather than actually believing that it wasn’t something they could poke their noses into like always.

That’s okay, though. Alec knows loopholes like old friends, and this means that so long as _Magnus_ leads the investigation, they have a lot more leeway as to process AND punishment.

(He thinks of themselves as _they_ far more often than not now; he and Magnus are a team, and if you wrong one you wrong the other no matter how slight the injustice.)

It wasn’t easy tracking down the person behind the warlock trap, but it wasn’t all that difficult either. It took them about a week to gather enough concrete evidence to implicate Roland Wantor, a young but promising warlock who had the misfortune to own a personality that kept grudges; grudges over things like being a downright asshole towards him when he worked as a barista in the 70’s (Lorenzo) to rebuffing his advances (Magnus).

“I was with you at the time,” Magnus grumbled. “And I was perfectly polite about it!”

Magnus and Alec had decided the best course of action was for the two of them to approach alone, with backup a portal away; far better to go in and arrest Roland peacefully than to storm the place with armoured Shadowhunter soldiers, after all. Alec doesn’t mourn the version of himself that would have thought differently.

Magnus goes to knock on the door to the house they’d tracked his last location to, but it creaks open under the first rap of his knuckles and he glances back at Alec, frowning. Alec doesn’t draw his bow, but he does rest his hand on the hilt nestled in the holster strapped to his thigh as they both silently agree to move forward. The large house looked ordinary from the outside, grass perhaps a little unkempt for this particular Hamptons neighbourhood, but everything inside is covered in a thick layer of dust. Unopened envelopes and flyers for long-past fairs and fetes litter the wooden corridor, and everything that Alec can see is painted in a murky blue-grey, the light struggling to make it through all the closed blinds.

They stop, make eye contact, reassess. Alec draws his bow and takes the lead.

They move silently towards the open door at the end of the hall. All the others they pass are locked, and while simple locks are no match for runes or magic, it would be a waste of their time. Alec takes the first step into the open living space, eyes trained to his left, while Magnus follows close behind and sweeps the right side of the room.

There is eerie silence. Then-

“Come to seek revenge, Mr Bane?”

The voice rings out around the room; its source is everywhere, nowhere.

“Come to seek justice, Roland, and perhaps more importantly answers.”

The voice scoffs. “If it’s answers you want, well. I don’t mind divulging them to dead men. I wish to be feared, revered, and if I need to stake my reputation on making sure everyone who wrongs me meets a violent end, then so be it. Have you brought this random Nephilim again just to pretend that you didn’t just reject me outright? As if you would even look twice at one of their kind.”

Magnus’s eyes narrowed, offended at the very notion that anyone could disregard Alec’s importance like that, and Alec smirks. This warlock really doesn’t know the type of fire he’s playing with.

“This _random Nephilim_ just so happens to be one that I not only looked at twice but also then married, Roland. Why don’t you come down here and address us face to face, hm? And we can settle this in a civil manner?”

“Are you accusing me of incivility?!” the voice snarled back, louder now. _I mean, attempted murder probably qualifies_ , Alec thinks, before his senses begin to prickle, hairs on his arms raising in a manner that he was intimately familiar with.

“Magnus, dem-“

A burst of magic cut him off mid-sentence, slamming him against the nearest wall _hard_. Pain shoots through his arm as he lands awkwardly, dropping his bow as he feels his wrist snap and crying out through gritted teeth. It’s nothing an iratze can’t fix, but Alec cannot _move_. He tries, but none of his limbs make any sort of headway against the invisible force pinning him there.

“Perhaps if I keep him there, you’ll be far more inclined to be nice to me,” the voice says, closer this time. Alec looks over at its new source; a pale, lanky man stood where no one had a moment before, clad in a tweed jacket, his legs those of a goat and his brown-grey hair slicked back. His eyes were sharp and cold over the frames of his small round sunglasses ( _completely ineffective,_ thought Alec). The words hit him then, and he can’t help the laugh that escapes him.

“Is something funny, Nephilim?” he spat.

Alec laughs again. “Oh man. You have no idea who you’re fucking with, do you?” The warlock frowns, as roughly insectoid demons shimmer from the air around the room, and despite his decades of training, Alec is near indifferent. He trusts Magnus, knows his capabilities, knows that Roland Wantor is about to get the rudest wake-up call of his life. “I’m all good here babe, take your time, have some fun,” he calls out cheerfully. Magnus nods in acknowledgment, closes his eyes in contentment.

When he opens them again, they are his own. The stillness of the air is suffocating.

The battle begins in a second and Alec attempts to drink it all in, despite tears of pain clouding his vision. As Magnus conjures wards for Alec, Roland surrounds himself in his own sickly green shield, attempting to leave Magnus to the mercy of the demons he’d summoned. One of them pounces from the back of the room straight at Magnus, only to be impaled on a spike of clear ice, splintering the floor and reaching towards the high ceiling. Alec smiles.

Magnus is a master of control, a brilliant dancer, and here in his battle element he is no different as he ducks and weaves and gestures a path of destruction. He cuts one demon in half using a portal closed opportunistically, causing its severed head to fall at a stricken Roland’s feet. Alec can’t help noticing Magnus’s shirt sleeves straining as he moves, the blood spattered across his brow from when one tried to get too close. If this is how Magnus felt when he saw Alec do this last week, he completely understands his husband’s recent desire for rougher sex.

The sight of demons felled in battle is poetry to Alec; there is a beauty in it he can’t describe. Even though he wishes he were the one partaking, admiring Magnus fulfilling the duty he was raised for feels a little like salvation. He watches as Magnus corrals four demons into pairs without them realising; one pair he lifts and surrounds in a sphere of moving water, the other he begins the same but encases them in a metal orb. He spins as they hover in the air, throwing out a stream of daggers of pure light with a mere wave of his arm at one who dared skitter into view, hitting his mark with every one. He smirks at Roland, before his outstretched palms call forth elemental destruction. Lightning strikes the sphere of water, causing the unfortunate beasts to explode inside their exoskeletons, viscera flowing now with the water. Fire envelops the metal orb and burns with intensity, and Alec can hear the shrieks as that pair are cooked alive.

There are still three more left. Roland looks terrified. Magnus doesn’t seem to care.

One brave one leaps, and Magnus pirouettes, catching it out of the air by its back and slamming it into the floor, crushed immediately as Magnus _stamps_ , shards of bone and blood flying out in a perfect circle around it. He kicks its body into its comrades, knocking it back from its advance where it meets a wall of force that hadn’t been there a second ago and disintegrates where it passes through.

There is one left, and this one has learnt. It cowers, snarls and hisses, facing Magnus all the while as he walks backwards through the carnage towards Alec.

“Hey,” Alec says.

“Hey yourself,” Magnus replies, pressing a kiss to his cheek. Alec feels his wrist reset, though truth be told, he’d barely noticed the pain, transfixed as he was. “Mind if I borrow this, darling?”

Magnus’s hand is on his seraph blade and Alec grins in anticipation, staring Roland down. “Go ahead, my love.” Alec enjoys the whimper he hears from Roland as Magnus pulls the blade free, bathing the room in bright crimson light. He strides forward. The demon charges, leaps. Magnus moves faster, grace guiding him, and slices the airborne demon. It hits the ground with three sickening thuds.

Roland’s shield is down now, and he’s backing up towards the door, fear in his eyes as Magnus turns towards him and cocks his head. “You hurt my husband,” he says, voice cold, every inch the prince of hell Alec knew he was by nature, and by nurture could never become. He advances.

Roland is pleading, but Alec doesn’t care to listen. He watches instead as Magnus’s magic snakes out, forcing him into a rigid pose, limbs extended, and begins to raise him up into the air. Even looking up at him, Magnus has all of the power.

Magnus looks utterly vengeful in this light.

“Did you know,” he hisses almost gleefully through his teeth, “that carbon makes up by mass around 18% of a human body? Most of the rest is gas, minus, oh, around 4% of other trace elements?”

Roland squeaked, held aloft and unable to move.

“Did you _also_ know that magic can serve as an effective replacement for the high temperatures and pressure needed for graphene to become diamond? Or, perhaps,” Magnus’s voice dropped dangerously low, “that I am the only warlock on this Earth capable of completely rearranging atoms without consequence? I don’t do it often, but I think I can make an exception.”

Roland begins to scream. Alec sees his legs begin to disintegrate from the bottom up, cloven feet the first victim. Dust falls, which Alec knows must be the trace amounts of solid elements in a human body, and as it creeps higher tiny crystals join the pile, catching the light. The screams sound almost animal.

It’s not until Magnus reaches his knees that the binds holding Alec finally falter, and he drops free to the floor. While there is some small part of him that calls for blood that finds this satisfying, he knows that it’s not the kind of justice he came for. He also knows that Magnus _not_ caught up in the frenzy of battle will regret this; he is harsh and unforgiving to those who do not deserve mercy and yet Magnus’s default state is a drive to do what is _right_ , no matter its difficulty.

Alec kicks carcasses out of his way as he walks swiftly to Magnus’s side, resting his hands on either bicep and gently pushing his arms down.

“Magnus, it’s okay. I’m here. You can stop now.”

There is resistance at first, but as Alec murmurs into his ear and presses his lips to his skin, the onslaught stops.

“You healed me Magnus, saved me. This is not the justice your people deserve, the punishment he should face.”

Magnus only exhales. Roland lowers gently to the ground, open wounds sealed shut, unconscious. Alec kisses the side of Magnus’s forehead.

He knows full well what his husband is capable of, the cruelty he has been forced to wield in order to survive, in order to please his father, knows that this trauma and state of being is as ingrained in him as his love for Alec. He knows this part of Magnus, but he also knows that this is not all that Magnus is, that Magnus is kinder than he is severe, more predisposed to generosity than retribution. He knows this, and knows that he is not going anywhere, and he thinks as his love sags into him that Magnus knows that now as well.


End file.
